UBC: The Devil's Dominion
Jan. 29th, 2011 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyGodbeer, Richard. The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
There are two problems that I complain about persistently when I'm blogging about the Salem Witchcraft Crisis. One is the tendency of Salem historians to go around proclaiming that they have found the One! True! Cause! The other is the failure of modern historians to cope with witchcraft beliefs.
Godbeer avoids complaint #1; this is only partly a book about Salem, and his scope--magic and the occult in seventeenth-century New England--is broad enough that he avoids the temptation of Salem-specific hobby-horses (although he has a hobby-horse or two of his own, as I'll discuss further down the page). In fact, one of the most useful things about The Devil's Dominion is the chapter in which Godbeer looks at the broad spectrum of causes for anxiety in Essex County in the two decades leading up to the trials: raids by Native Americans, hostile micromanagement by the English government, Quakers (seriously--Quakers were as threatening to Puritans as Catholics), smallpox.
On the other hand, he falls down absymally over complaint #2. He criticizes John Putnam Demos for his psychoanalytic model of witchcraft affliction, without seeming to realize that his own model of how affliction expressed anxieties about salvation and personal responsibility for sin does exactly the same thing, and even more meretriciously. For example:
And:
1. "he redefined the situation by becoming possessed": here and elsewhere, Godbeer is very sloppy about respecting the worldview of his subjects. The suggestion that the boy consciously chose to become possessed means that, really, this book should be about conmen and gulls. Throughout, while Godbeer acknowledges that "ordinary people" believed in magic, he tends to assume implicitly that cunning folk and confessing witches and afflicted and possessed people, deep down in their heart of hearts, knew better. For example, in talking about Katherine Harrison's prediction that Elizabeth Bateman would not marry the man who was currently courting her, but would marry a man named Simon: "There could be any number of explanations for Harrison's accuracy: she may have realized that their master's opposition to the marriage was unshakeable; she may have been using the medium of fortune-telling to lobby on Simon Smith's [Bateman's eventual husband] behalf. What matters for our purpose here is that townsfolk not privy to such explanations automatically assumed that Harrison had occult powers" (33-34). He assumes there has to be an "explanation," that Harrison must have been basing her prediction on psychology or on a preference for a different man (although from Godbeer's very brief discussion, I notice that we, as readers, have no evidence that Harrison knew Simon Smith at all; nor do we know how much time elapsed between prediction and marriage). In Godbeer's view, Harrison must have been scamming Bateman. At another point, talking about Puritan intellectuals' habit of collecting weird occurrences (or "especial providences," in Puritan vocabulary), "Hull did not try to interpret these wonders; nor did Winthrop. [...] But neither did they express any doubt as to the objective reality of these bizarre phenomena" (58).
"Objective reality"? That's a post-Enlightenment yardstick, and it very emphatically needs not to be applied to pre-Enlightenment thinkers. It puts the discussion in terms that none of the people under discussion would have used or been comfortable with. Or, to use another post-Enlightenment term, grokked.
Now, I am not saying that historians of seventeenth-century New England have to believe in divination or witchcraft or any other point of their subjects' cosmology. But I am saying that they have to approach that cosmology, and all those beliefs, with respect and without trying to explain them away for post-Enlightenment readers. Because in so doing, all the historian accomplishes is to put another layer of obscuration and confusion over his or her analytical lens. And implicitly encourages the belief that his or her pre-Enlightenment subjects were a bunch of gullible fools. Which they were not.
2. "a central spiritual issue: liability for sin": this is Godbeer's hobby-horse. He insists on viewing all occult practices and fears in New England through this lens, which I think makes him twist a lot of things out of true.
3. "the emotional relief provided by temporary fusion of self and Satan": this seems to me GRIEVOUSLY to misinterpret and misrepresent Puritans. I don't want to commit the same mistake in reverse, so I'm trying to resist the impulse to an equally sweeping generalization. But my reading of and about Puritans has indicated that their worldview was all about the struggle between good and evil. That if spectacles of witchcraft affliction struck a resonant chord in local communities (which I actually tend to agree it did), it wasn't because there was any relief of any kind in the "temporary fusion of self and Satan" (a very modern idea, and one that dismisses any layers of meaning of the concept of Satan beyond the psychological) but because the spectacle was a direct representation of the cosmic struggle Puritans believed themselves to be principal actors in.
4. "Possession": Godbeer's use of this term irritated me into yelling at the book, partly because he was very close to doing something clever, innovative, and extremely useful and he booted it.
What Godbeer was gesturing toward was a comparison of witchcraft affliction and spirit possession. I think this is a fascinating idea and potentially useful, like the comparisons with nineteenth-century hysterics. The problem is that Godbeer rushes his fences: he doesn't lay out the parameters of the comparison (which means he elides the distinction between voluntary and involuntary, as well as benevolent and malevolent), and rather than making a careful and nuanced analysis, he collapses affliction and possession into one thing, whereas for New England Puritans, they were very different things (even though they might look quite similar) and belonged in different categories. Affliction was what happened when you angered a witch, or when the Devil was trying to coerce you into serving him. Possession was what happened when you agreed to serve the Devil. One was a sign of virtue, the other a sign of evil. Girls like Elizabeth Knapp and Mary Warren wavered back and forth across that line, confessing and recanting having signed the Devil's covenant, and it has been clear to me, from what I've read, that those two states were recognized and treated as distinct by those around them. Conflating them makes it easier to talk about witchcraft, but it also muddles the very thing you're trying to understand.
As with Escaping Salem, the other book of Godbeer's that I've read, The Devil's Dominion is competent to very good research-wise: he's read a lot more Puritan divines than I could ever bear to, that's for sure, and he did an excellent job of laying out primary evidence for the schism between the legal definition of witchcraft (a covenant with the Devil) and the popular definition of witchcraft (maleficium: doing harm to others by occult means), and I only wish he'd done a better job of talking about why that schism persisted and its causal relationship to the history of witchcraft proceedings. Analytically, the book ranges from plebeian to reductive to what I would call out and out wrong.
So, interesting but frustrating. As so many books on the subject seem to be.
There are two problems that I complain about persistently when I'm blogging about the Salem Witchcraft Crisis. One is the tendency of Salem historians to go around proclaiming that they have found the One! True! Cause! The other is the failure of modern historians to cope with witchcraft beliefs.
Godbeer avoids complaint #1; this is only partly a book about Salem, and his scope--magic and the occult in seventeenth-century New England--is broad enough that he avoids the temptation of Salem-specific hobby-horses (although he has a hobby-horse or two of his own, as I'll discuss further down the page). In fact, one of the most useful things about The Devil's Dominion is the chapter in which Godbeer looks at the broad spectrum of causes for anxiety in Essex County in the two decades leading up to the trials: raids by Native Americans, hostile micromanagement by the English government, Quakers (seriously--Quakers were as threatening to Puritans as Catholics), smallpox.
On the other hand, he falls down absymally over complaint #2. He criticizes John Putnam Demos for his psychoanalytic model of witchcraft affliction, without seeming to realize that his own model of how affliction expressed anxieties about salvation and personal responsibility for sin does exactly the same thing, and even more meretriciously. For example:
The boy's repeated attempts to confess indicate a sense of personal culpability, yet his very belief that he was tempted by the Devil placed him in a passive role. Eventually he redefined the situation by becoming possessed. Possession constituted both abdication and recognition of responsibility. The boy [...] had transformed himself into a victim and became the recipient of much public sympathy.
(113)
And:
Local communities became gripped by the spectacle of the possessed because it spoke to a central spiritual issue: liability for sin. The struggle of the victim struck a resonant chord in the community at large: through another's possession, people could experience vicariously the emotional relief provided by temporary fusion of self and Satan.
(119)
1. "he redefined the situation by becoming possessed": here and elsewhere, Godbeer is very sloppy about respecting the worldview of his subjects. The suggestion that the boy consciously chose to become possessed means that, really, this book should be about conmen and gulls. Throughout, while Godbeer acknowledges that "ordinary people" believed in magic, he tends to assume implicitly that cunning folk and confessing witches and afflicted and possessed people, deep down in their heart of hearts, knew better. For example, in talking about Katherine Harrison's prediction that Elizabeth Bateman would not marry the man who was currently courting her, but would marry a man named Simon: "There could be any number of explanations for Harrison's accuracy: she may have realized that their master's opposition to the marriage was unshakeable; she may have been using the medium of fortune-telling to lobby on Simon Smith's [Bateman's eventual husband] behalf. What matters for our purpose here is that townsfolk not privy to such explanations automatically assumed that Harrison had occult powers" (33-34). He assumes there has to be an "explanation," that Harrison must have been basing her prediction on psychology or on a preference for a different man (although from Godbeer's very brief discussion, I notice that we, as readers, have no evidence that Harrison knew Simon Smith at all; nor do we know how much time elapsed between prediction and marriage). In Godbeer's view, Harrison must have been scamming Bateman. At another point, talking about Puritan intellectuals' habit of collecting weird occurrences (or "especial providences," in Puritan vocabulary), "Hull did not try to interpret these wonders; nor did Winthrop. [...] But neither did they express any doubt as to the objective reality of these bizarre phenomena" (58).
"Objective reality"? That's a post-Enlightenment yardstick, and it very emphatically needs not to be applied to pre-Enlightenment thinkers. It puts the discussion in terms that none of the people under discussion would have used or been comfortable with. Or, to use another post-Enlightenment term, grokked.
Now, I am not saying that historians of seventeenth-century New England have to believe in divination or witchcraft or any other point of their subjects' cosmology. But I am saying that they have to approach that cosmology, and all those beliefs, with respect and without trying to explain them away for post-Enlightenment readers. Because in so doing, all the historian accomplishes is to put another layer of obscuration and confusion over his or her analytical lens. And implicitly encourages the belief that his or her pre-Enlightenment subjects were a bunch of gullible fools. Which they were not.
2. "a central spiritual issue: liability for sin": this is Godbeer's hobby-horse. He insists on viewing all occult practices and fears in New England through this lens, which I think makes him twist a lot of things out of true.
3. "the emotional relief provided by temporary fusion of self and Satan": this seems to me GRIEVOUSLY to misinterpret and misrepresent Puritans. I don't want to commit the same mistake in reverse, so I'm trying to resist the impulse to an equally sweeping generalization. But my reading of and about Puritans has indicated that their worldview was all about the struggle between good and evil. That if spectacles of witchcraft affliction struck a resonant chord in local communities (which I actually tend to agree it did), it wasn't because there was any relief of any kind in the "temporary fusion of self and Satan" (a very modern idea, and one that dismisses any layers of meaning of the concept of Satan beyond the psychological) but because the spectacle was a direct representation of the cosmic struggle Puritans believed themselves to be principal actors in.
4. "Possession": Godbeer's use of this term irritated me into yelling at the book, partly because he was very close to doing something clever, innovative, and extremely useful and he booted it.
What Godbeer was gesturing toward was a comparison of witchcraft affliction and spirit possession. I think this is a fascinating idea and potentially useful, like the comparisons with nineteenth-century hysterics. The problem is that Godbeer rushes his fences: he doesn't lay out the parameters of the comparison (which means he elides the distinction between voluntary and involuntary, as well as benevolent and malevolent), and rather than making a careful and nuanced analysis, he collapses affliction and possession into one thing, whereas for New England Puritans, they were very different things (even though they might look quite similar) and belonged in different categories. Affliction was what happened when you angered a witch, or when the Devil was trying to coerce you into serving him. Possession was what happened when you agreed to serve the Devil. One was a sign of virtue, the other a sign of evil. Girls like Elizabeth Knapp and Mary Warren wavered back and forth across that line, confessing and recanting having signed the Devil's covenant, and it has been clear to me, from what I've read, that those two states were recognized and treated as distinct by those around them. Conflating them makes it easier to talk about witchcraft, but it also muddles the very thing you're trying to understand.
As with Escaping Salem, the other book of Godbeer's that I've read, The Devil's Dominion is competent to very good research-wise: he's read a lot more Puritan divines than I could ever bear to, that's for sure, and he did an excellent job of laying out primary evidence for the schism between the legal definition of witchcraft (a covenant with the Devil) and the popular definition of witchcraft (maleficium: doing harm to others by occult means), and I only wish he'd done a better job of talking about why that schism persisted and its causal relationship to the history of witchcraft proceedings. Analytically, the book ranges from plebeian to reductive to what I would call out and out wrong.
So, interesting but frustrating. As so many books on the subject seem to be.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-01-29 10:00 pm (UTC)(Having taken a class on spirit possession, I'm also fascinated by that possible connection, and would love to read a book that handles it well.)
no subject
Date: 2011-01-30 08:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-30 08:55 pm (UTC)Your first comment makes me think that what I really want is an anthropological study of what happened in Salem in 1692. Of course, to the best of my knowledge there isn't one.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-30 09:25 pm (UTC)(Edited to mend a stupid typo.)
no subject
Date: 2011-01-31 05:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-31 07:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-29 11:38 pm (UTC)Well, at least he's got a good name for his subject.
Putting it all together intuitively
Date: 2011-01-30 08:03 am (UTC)I'm still hoping you'll get around to reading my Salem novel, THE AFFLICTED GIRLS. I think you might be surprised with how I put all of it together. You might even agree with the "one cause" that I propose for the "afflictions."
Thanks,
Suzy Witten